Niceville

amber-colored. Apple cider, he realized. A pot of cowboy coffee was heating up on the stovetop. Clearly this woman liked things simple. There wasn’t a Pop-Tart or a box of Cheerios anywhere in sight.
    She sat straight and watched him eat the first couple of spoonfuls, her pale green eyes bright against the rough tan of her skin, her black hair hanging straight down on either side of her face. She wore no makeup at all and showed signs of a hard life lived mainly outdoors, but she was, in the warm light of the morning, very beautiful, in an unadorned and countrified sort of way. Her expression was thoughtful and remote, as if she hadn’t quite decided what to do with him yet.
    From somewhere deeper inside the main floor he heard the tinny sound of music playing, and then a man’s voice, from the barking cadence some sort of radio ad.
    If she has a radio
, Merle thought,
she knows what happened in Gracie and she knows what I am
.
    If she did, she wasn’t talking about it. Maybe the cops were already on the way. Not much he could do about that. She seemed to feel no need to say anything at all right now, but Merle did.
    “I want to thank you for what you did. My name is Merle Zane. I’m sorry, miss, I don’t know your name yet?”
    There was a pause while she seemed to come back to the here and now from some place quite far away.
    “My name is Glynis. Glynis Ruelle,” she said, in a low voice with that Tidewater lilt in it, pronouncing the last name “Roo-elle,” giving it a kind of New Orleans Creole twist. “I was born Glynis Mercer, but I’ve been a Ruelle now for twenty years. And where you are is Ruelle Plantation. We breed Clydes, got good cash crops of wheat and rape-seed and potatoes. Been in the Ruelle family since before the War Between the States.”
    “I saw people out in the fields.”
    Some indefinable emotion crossed her face. She lifted her head—she had a great profile—and looked off in the direction of the fields.
    “Not many left. They die off or disappear. I’m always trying to find new help for the harvest. Albert Lee takes the Blue Bird down to town now and then, and men come back, migrants, mainly, but then maybe I’m too particular. All the help we have lives in the Annex, a barracks we built down by Little Cut Creek. The help seem to like it better that way.”
    “You said you run this place alone.”
    She gave him a sidelong look.
    “These days I do. But I seem to be up to it.”
    Merle was conscious of sitting across from her in what she had described as her husband’s clothes.
    “Your husband … he’s traveling?”
    This brought a wry smile.
    “John went into the wars and got himself killed.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “So am I,” she said, with a flash of heat. “But it was a damn foolish war in the first place. The president should never have taken it up. I didn’t want John to go, but he was in the reserves so he went with the First Infantry. A married man with a farm, they shouldn’t have called on him, but they did. I guess they had their reasons, and they did them no credit. But the thing was done. His younger brother, Ethan, went too. Ethan came back, at least some of him did, but now the running of this place is up to me. But I’m not angry with John. He felt he had to go with his unit. I blame that dimwitted grinning fool of a president for taking up a needless war.”
    Merle, not being a huge fan of that particular president either, didn’t disagree with her. But since he was an accessory to the murder of four cops he didn’t feel that a detailed discussion of service to countryand how it had affected her family was a subject he should get into. Her next question drove it off his list entirely.
    “Are you a man of violence, Mr. Zane?”
    Merle was going to say no, since he had never thought of himself that way, but given the events of the past couple of days, and what it had been necessary to do to survive Angola, he felt he needed to think about that again. Mrs. Ruelle watched him do it, patient, contained, seeming to have no particular expectations.
    “Yes,” he said. “I didn’t intend to go that way, but I guess that’s where I am.”
    “You had a pistol with you. From what you told me, you stood your ground while another man was shooting at you. With one bullet in you already and a grazing wound on your shoulder.”
    “Things happened fast. I did what I had to. I can’t say I shot well, since I emptied my gun and I think I only hit